CBO - To score or not to score......

Here's what Rep. Gohmert said last night.

RESTORING THE RULE OF LAW -- (House of Representatives - October 13, 2009)

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Mr. GOHMERT. Thank you for yielding.

Let me just tell you about some of the problems with the rules that we in the minority have encountered here this year. It is amazing just how grossly unfair and closed and partisan the rule usage has been in this body.

Now, for example, CBO, the Congressional Budget Office, has been hailed for years and years as one of the most fair and suprapartisan--they're above being partisan--entities that there is in Washington, D.C. And many people will recall, I'm sure, that after a tough thumping that H.R. 3200 got as just how costly it was going to be, as CBO had estimated, the head of CBO was called over to the White House, to the White House woodshed, apparently. Behind closed doors and lots of guards, there was a discussion we weren't privy to. But lo and behold, CBO seems to be much more lenient now in looking the other way on some things and coming out with scoring that we wouldn't have thought was possible.

But if you go back to early in the summer, as my friends here know, I have had a health care plan that is an alternative. It's a solution. It came from listening, you know, hundreds and hundreds of hours to people that knew exactly what they were talking about and putting it together in a plan. Then we were trying to get the plan into bill form. We were told that I was not on the committee of jurisdiction, and therefore there just wasn't much chance of getting that done.

But we were also told you cannot get a bill scored unless it has been put in bill form by Legislative Counsel's office. And the Legislative Counsel's office is the one that said, Look, we've got so many submittals, there is no way we're going to get to that any time soon.

So we kept pushing and pushing because we had to get it in bill form because we were told that unless you get your plan in bill form--not a concept like the Senate has done. How ridiculous is that? A concept. You vote on a concept? Excuse me. There needs to be language that you fight over. You can't have a staffer come in at the last minute or some--maybe ACORN is going to help them with that, too, but you can't do that.

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So, anyway, we fought for a couple of months. We finally, with the help of Ranking Member Joe Barton and others in our party saying please get this into a bill form, the last week of July the Legislative Counsel's office was able to get it in bill form. We were able to get it worked on and then get it filed on July 31st.

Well, in August, we started requesting that, now that it was in bill form, please, CBO, would you score our bill because we were told you couldn't get it scored until it was a bill, so we got it into bill form. And then we were told, Well, you know what? You're not on the committee of jurisdiction, so we may not be able to get to that. So again Ranking Member Joe Barton made a request, and we were told it was in the queue back in August.

Then in September I was told, Well, you don't have a request from the Joint Tax Committee. Our ranking member on that is Dave Camp, so I talked to Dave. Wonderful guy. Dave made the request as the ranking member of the

Joint Tax Committee, so then we got that request in in September.

So imagine my surprise when Senator Baucus comes up with a concept--not a bill, a concept--and lo and behold they're able to score his concept even though there is no language there, and they go through these mock hearings over a concept without having the actual language and vote on a concept. It's my understanding that the definitive language is still not there yet.

So, anyway, we know that CBO, the way they've been able to phrase it, the media has been able to come out and say, Wow, this is going to cost hundreds of billions of dollars, but it's really not going to hurt us financially. Man, that woodshedding at the White House must have really done a lot of good for the White House. That's all I can figure.

But let me also say this to anyone who has ears. Anyone who comes to this House floor and says, The Republicans, we've reached out to them, but they have no solutions, they have no proposal, is either a very, very ignorant person who will not avail themselves of the vast amount of information around on our proposals and our solutions or they are misrepresenting the truth. That's just the way it is. And we hear that over and over. Gee, we have reached out to the Republicans. They've got no solutions. They've got no proposals.

The President himself said that on Monday before he came in here to this joint session. He said, You've heard all the lies, and what are their proposals, what are their plans? I'll tell you, they don't have any. Well, he was either being very ignorant or he was misrepresenting the facts. And it may be that he really didn't know, that whoever put that information in the teleprompter, he was just dutifully reading it and he really didn't know one way or the other. So I want to be fair about that.

In any event, when we hear all of this stuff about the fairness and reaching out, it was my understanding that the President has not invited a Republican since March to come to the White House and talk about health care. If that's different, I would love to know the facts.

I know the President stood right up here and said, you know, If you have solutions, my door is open. And apparently, you know, I don't have any way to dispel that. I'm sure he was being honest, if that is true, his door is open, but the problem is they have so many massive gates and so many heavily armed guards between us and that open door at the Oval Office that we can't get to the open door, and so that makes it problematic.

But anyway, these are some of the frustrations we've been dealing with lately. And I'm hoping maybe CBO will end up being able to score my bill sometime before the end of the session, a year and a half from now. It's just hard to know. But it is amazing how they were able to find time to score something that wasn't even a bill after I was told we can't score it unless it is. But anyway, apparently there's a lot of flexibility there after you go to the woodshed at the White House.

And with that, I will yield back to my friend.